So, Who Teaches the Teachers?

By Mitch Siegler, Founder

How do you think Colleges of Education teach teachers to succeed? You’re probably imagining classes on behavior and classroom management, theory of education, even some subject matter expertise.

Sadly, those worthy topics are increasingly taking a backseat to radical approaches that don’t measure proficiency in reading or math scores, but rather in how thoroughly students absorb the ideology of grievance and division.

Take the University of California, Santa Cruz – please. UCSC offers B.A. degrees not in “Education” or “Teaching” but “Education, Democracy, and Justice.”  This quaint major makes no bones about its ideological orientation, highlighting the “department faculty and the program’s social justice orientations.” With core courses which “incorporate history and insights from action and participatory forms of research and community organizing to highlight the relationship between education and democratic politics”. It’s a university major in activism masquerading as an education degree

In case it wasn’t clear from the description, the department spells out its goals plainly:

“To provide students with the knowledge, skills, and dispositions to become leaders in their communities who can impact a wide array of educational and social institutions, including schools, and put their combination of coursework, research, and fieldwork experiences to work in improving the lives of the least advantaged to advance the welfare of all.”

Ironically, UCSC and other aligned institutions’ decisions to prioritize protest over proficiency has done great harm to disadvantaged groups, in particular, by limiting their exposure to a range of ideas, failing to encourage students to think critically or debate complex issues and disregarding fundamental skills in favor of political consciousness.

Of course, there’s a strong undercurrent of grievance, with many lessons reinforcing the idea that grit and hard work are of no value in a society where the deck is stacked against these “oppressed” students because of their skin color, ethnicity or other immutable characteristics. The mirror image lesson to other students – those dubbed “oppressors” – is that they’re to blame for society’s ills and ought to feel guilty for what their parents, grandparents or someone they’ve never met but who shares their skin color or ethnicity may have once done.

One of the authors of California’s openly anti-American, anti-Western, anti-free markets and antisemitic Liberated Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum is a UCSC professor, who has turned her quest for LES into a semester-long course. The recipient of UCSC’s Education Department’s 2026 Excellence in Teaching Award “centers critical social theory and education as it relates to race, gender, and class-based perspectives and anticolonial and radical Black theory,” and studies “the role of radical Black organizers in educational struggles.”

While some California education departments are among the worst offenders in the discipline, they are by no means alone.

The University of Colorado School of Education says it “centers on democracy, diversity, equity, and justice,” “seeks to reflect a commitment to enact anti-racist education in all of our actions and decisions,” and is “committed to building a critical mass of BIPOC faculty, staff, and students, to transform the culture of the School of Education, the university and K-12 schools” by “leveraging diversity to organize for justice.”

Notwithstanding that racial preferences in education are flagrantly unconstitutional, the University apparently has nothing to say about diversity of thought or even student outcomes – but they have volumes to say about group identity and activism.

The University of Texas, San Antonio’s Mexican American Studies Department offers K-12 teacher workshops in “decolonial, Chicana feminist, and anti-racist pedagogies.” The school includes a land acknowledgment that characterizes San Antonio as “occupied territory” and a Black Lives Matter solidarity statement that asserts “white supremacy has been an insidious system of domination that has assaulted Black communities on this continent and globally for centuries” and promises to create “greater consciousness around our shared histories of resistance, political struggles, and movements for collective liberation.”

See the pattern? These schools’ overriding focus isn’t training teachers to teach students the skills they need to succeed in a dynamic and complex world. Rather, they’re focused on training activists who will produce more activists. Building up and creating are out; tearing down is in.

While THINC Foundation focuses on what happens in K-12 classrooms, we can’t miss the through-line between the pernicious ideology being peddled to students in K-12 schools and on college campuses and that same ideology first being taught to teachers in university Education departments.

Returning the focus of K-12 education to fundamental skills and critical thinking – not critical theory – will require reforming colleges of education across the country. Please join us in standing up and spreading the word.